The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“…and if I have any advice to give to anybody it’s this: take up watercolor painting.”

— Charles Bukowski / Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“When I lace my boots, before stepping out for my walk, I’m entering a ritual. I’m mindful of the notepaper and the small yellow pencil in my pocket. The work of writing has begun … As important as the act of shutting the door of the study has been the act of opening it and stepping out for a stroll. Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy were all walkers.”

— Amitava Kumar / Everyday I Write the Book: Notes on Style

“In America, everything is for sale. Migrants 
pay for safety. We pay people to believe 
that what we tell them is true, especially 
when we have spared them the hardest 
facts to hold.”

— Alan Pelaez Lopez / “Overalls”

“It’s no wonder business is booming for the tattoo removal industry. What was once a symbol of permanence that could only be covered up by another tattoo can now be erased – perhaps the ultimate testament to our increasingly throwaway society.”

— Martha Busby / “‘Like being burned with cooking oil’: how tattoo removal became a booming business” / The Guardian

“I am afraid of my voice.
I do not like my face.”

— Anne Stevenson / “Television”

“The second event was the adoption of Dum Diversas, the fifteenth-century papal bull that decreed the king of Portugal could, by divine right, ‘invade, search out, capture, and subjugate’ any non-Christian lands and ‘reduce their persons into perpetual servitude.’ Church-sanctioned murder and enslavement would be renewed and extended to the king of Spain through the Inter Caetera of 1493.

The impact of these geographically unlimited decrees cannot be overstated. In the ‘New World,’ they paved the way for the Middle Passage and Manifest Destiny, and then reservations, boarding schools, forced sterilization, tribal termination, chattel slavery.”

— Lisa Wells / Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World

“When I die they can take my work and wipe a cat’s ass with it. It will be of no earthly use to me.”

— Charles Bukowski / Notes of a Dirty Old Man

What I’m Listening To:

“I thought I saw a young couple clinging to a round baby
But it was a bundle of trash and food
Trash and food”

— Dry Cleaning / “Stumpwork”